Meet Jason at MediaPost Events

oday's column marks the one-year anniversary of my Online Spin column (and 11 years since I was first featured in the publication -- how time flies). Writing a substantive and thought-provoking weekly
column is no easy task, particularly while growing a business. The weekly deadline was both rewarding and challenging. But now I must pass the torch.

We are all familiar with the old adage "less is more." Yet there is only a half-truth in that statement. The consumer journey has become more complex. The strategies that drive how we reach, engage,
and influence the consumer are becoming more complex. The methods and systems that we use to plan, buy and optimize media are becoming more complex. Cross-functional collaborative dependencies have
become more complex. We must embrace complexity -- but this complexity must be interpreted, prioritized and presented as simple ideas that inform cross-functional teams within the organization.

As social media budgets continue to rise, demands from the C-suite to prove the value of these investments are intensifying. Executives do intuitively understand that direct consumer relationships are
valuable, and they are patiently, albeit eagerly, awaiting the ability of their marketing departments and agencies to correlate the economic impact of ongoing social media investments.

Every company should have a digital champion to facilitate and motivate the progressive cultural shift towards embracing cross-functional collaboration and iteration. Sometimes this digital muse is an
internal team member, and sometimes an external partner. But without that spark, all pistons won't be firing. Marketing leaders must adopt a formal plan to organize for digital excellence, develop
written processes, rally the troops, and enforce productive workflow.

I've been working on perfecting a calculation for a normalized index of multiple objectives and priorities that allows for the comparative analysis of
campaigns and elements within campaigns. The resulting digital media performance score is not skewed by campaign scale and should be well formulated
such that the calculation does not change over time. Of course, I can't give away the entire punchline here, but I will walk you through the general
framework for creating your own model.

As an industry, we have made several promises that we have yet to keep. The promise of accountability, while realized for direct response marketers,
is still a conundrum for most brand marketers. In our somewhat-modern digital marketing age, we have not yet overcome a number of measurement
challenges, some of which are never acknowledged by the very strategists and media planners managing significant media investments.

Are you passionate about the positions you take on digital marketing issues? Do you question the biases of the research you use, or the methodologies of the testing and optimization approaches employed by your agency? What about the validity and value of the targeting data used by your media and ad tech partners? How often do you engage in debates with your colleagues?

Most brands seem to understand that mobile apps must provide clear utility or entertainment value to the consumer. Some have actually achieved this in execution. However, few are truly transformative, more than a box checked off a list of digital tactics.

Sometimes the holidays provide just enough breathing room to think about important issues that you may not ordinarily have the time to deal with during the normal course of the rat race. Here are a few of the tough questions that I am recommending marketers think about as we round the corner into a new year of challenges and triumphs.

@Nick - indeed. However, eventually execs do expect us to eventually be able to model the economic impact of the proxies that we measure. How engagement translates into economic impact (not exact ROI) is an important point to get to. Especially when brands are spending millions of dollars in social media.

@Joe - Ultimately execs will always want to know the economic impact of large scale investments. ROI is probably too strict a KPI - and that's sort of the point of this piece, but economic impact, at least through modeling, if not directly, will become important to be able to report to execs over the next year or so, as social media budgets are now regularly in the seven figures. Remember that even brand metrics indirectly get tied back to business results. Brand equity is an asset that has proven to drive revenue growth. Soon enough we will be able to prove the same of social media engagement, at scale.
@Cory - bring it on brother! Looking forward to reading it.

@Annie - neither ROAS nor CPA is a valid measure of branding, of course. The reason why "commerce" has a bucket in the performance score is to add the dimension of measurable sales as part of the score to whatever weighted degree you see fit. It should be weighted less than the other metrics so as to not overpower the score. ROAS can certainly be swapped out for CPA. They both do not take scale into account, which is the point. Thanks for the reply.

@Nick -The commerce metric, actually, all metrics in this model, are normalized so that scale of the campaign won't skew it per se. By using ROAS, CPL, and/or some type of measurable offline metric that comes back to a 'cost per', the score for that bucket will not be affected by scale unless scale itself improves performance of the bucket.
The 'E' value for static ads would be engagement with landing pages/website activities - it will be a smaller number, and thus would impact the 'E' portion of the score accordingly.
This model changes a bit for online video, when the objective can be "passive exposure" (sometimes online video budgets are augments of TV budgets) and not brand engagement in the same interactive way that rich media provides. In this instance the 'E' can be a metric tied to duration of exposure, but this is a very different form of engagement and not an apples to apples comparison. That said, the difference in metrics and measurement of display/rich media and video has been a tough point generally.
The performance score as outlined in this article is really for display (or interactive video).

Thanks for chiming in Kirby. A valid point from a DSP/DMP perspective -- I agree 100%, you should know how your CPM is being sliced and allocated. But for other ad tech (like optimization or statistical algorithm models as examples) transparency may never be a reality.

To a degree what you point out is a lack of leadership, part of which is properly managing up. If the grind is too much for someone to effectively fulfill their role, they need to make the case for additional resources. If financially this case cannot be made, a true leader would owe it to themselves to seek employment elsewhere.
That said -- There are always some trade offs that we must live with. We must each decide the degree of which these trade offs are acceptable in our own personal careers.